I'm having a hard time trusting anyone these days, and it's only partially due to election-season fatigue. More recently, a couple of high-profile athletes have bombed the John Q. Public lie detector test.

One is Manti Te'o, the Notre Dame linebacker who says he was duped into believing a girlfriend he met online had died. Apparently she never existed; it was a hoax perpetrated by a friend of Te'o, or maybe Te'o himself.

While details are fuzzy, one thing is obvious: Someone was lying.

Then there's Lance Armstrong's admission — after more than a decade of denial — that he used performance-enhancing drugs to win the Tour de France seven times.

This has discouraged but not deterred me from seeking the truth. In fact, it has motivated me. In my research, I've discovered some shocking facts on other enduring sports tales.

I get the confusion and suspicion over Manti's story, but I think the
media, along with a few people who like to assume the worst about people, is
mixing him in with some pretty extreme cases of dishonesty and corruption.And if his story proves to be a lie on his part, which IMO it won't. It
still hurts no one.He had nothing to gain from the hoax except a little
more compassion or sympathy since his grandmother had also recently died.Lance made millions and millions.

I guess I'm just a little
disappointed at how people tend to give a pass to some people when they've
clearly done some serious wrong vs a guy who got sucker punched and now has to
be hung by the same rope as some of the more corrupt athletes of the decade.Putting Manti and Lance in the same story is just plain wrong.

This is like one of those jokes at a family party that was soooo funny when you
thought of it, then when no one laughed but instead looked at you with confused
faces and you had to explain it to them....oh what the heck!

But in a Dec. 8 interview with South
Bend, Ind., TV station WSBT, Te'o said, "I really got hit with cancer.
I lost both my grandparents an my girlfriend to cancer." And on Dec. 11, he
talked about his girlfriend in a newspaper interview. "

He may
have been duped, but it appears from the above that he did some duping himself.

@AZRodsYou state; "He had nothing to gain from the hoax except a
little more compassion or sympathy since his grandmother had also recently
died.Lance made millions and millions."

How about Heisman
sympathy votes? Get that on your Resume and your looking at serious bucks,
higher draft pick!Come on people, wake up on this one Manti knew all about
it, we live in a world of Realty TV, Manti just joined cast.

"Oh
what a tangled web we weave, when first we practice to deceive" Sir Walter
Scott

@Barney Google.You are on to something. A family friend doesn't keep
up a hoax like that for three years unless he has an audience. And the whole
girlfriend idea was great grist for the media mill.Had Manti called a
press conference on December 6th, had his parents called the police on December
26th, had Notre Dame notified the NCAA on December 26th...we would be inclined
to have some sympathy for Manti Te'o.Confessing when the story hits
the Internet doesn't look good.

Stop comparing Manti Te'o to Lance Armstrong. They
are not the same. Armstrong's lies and deceit earned him several Tour de
France titles, money from endorsements, and even an olympic medal. Te'o
didn't have a motive to lie, other than to *maybe* garner some national
attention. Stop selling this as the "Te'o Scandal." It's not
a scandal. He didn't earn the awards he received because he told a sob
story about his "girlfriend" dying...or did you already forget his
defensive achievements?

If Te'o knew it was a hoax or
perpetuated it in any way, he's a fool. It's a stupid thing to lie
about, and for what? But to compare him with Armstrong is absurd. It's
not like Te'o won the Heisman or received anything more than a little extra
media coverage during the season because of this lie. Good for him, he tugged
our heart strings a bit. Clap clap. Move along with your lives, people,
nothing to see here.

Of course the Te'o issue is not in the same class as
the Armstrong situation. Just because it happened at the same time, involves an
athlete and is mentioned in the same article does not me equivalence.

But, if you think this is not a story, your head is in the sand.

Time will tell how culpable Te'o is, but, his hands are not clean
regardless.

I know it's not on the same level as Armstrong --
that's precisely my point. It's only a story because the media
can't find anything else to talk about. So if it's not on the same
level as Armstrong, why does the media keep drawing parallels between the
two?

What if I lied about having a girlfriend who died? Nobody would
care. So why does everybody care just because it's Te'o? It seems
like a weird situation, I'll give you that. It seems like he lied, but
that's still debatable at this point. I'm not defending him, I'm
just saying it's not as big as everyone portrays it to be.

It's also not really a matter of culpability. I mean, let's be
honest, it's not like he lied about his grades to get into the university,
or lied about taking drugs, or lied about accepting money from a booster, or
lied about following team rules, etc. etc. If he had anything to do with it
(which hasn't been confirmed yet), it was a stupid thing to do. But again,
why lie about having a girlfriend who died of leukemia? Why does anyone care?
Slow news week.